Monday, March 29, 2010

How to Organize your Gmail





Most people use Gmail, let’s accept the fact. Email is the most common way of communication these days. People even email to the person next to them; Of course, this is done not to disturb him/her. I used to have a habit of subscribing my email to every possible company out there, this is to get some coupons through email or say free scoop of ice cream from Ben and Jerry on my birth day or a free desert. Instead of coupons most of the times I used to get promotional emails that describe new products and offer that are not actually exciting. Sometimes I used to lose emails from friends in that jungle of emails from these companies. First thing I did was I kept that email account and created a new one, I informed all my friends about my new email. Now using the forwarding feature, I made sure that all my emails from my previous email account are added to this new email account. There is a feature in Gmail that allows users to receive emails from other accounts and skip inbox into a labeled folder. We can label this folder with the email address of the source. This makes it easy for me to check all my emails from both the accounts with single login. 

Imagine my first email is abc@gmail.com (forwarded account) and new account is xyz@gmail.com , I can send a reply to an email I received to abc@gmail.com with either abc@gmail.com orxyz@gmail.com . Not only Gmail, it is possible to forward emails from yahoo, AOL and other clients to Gmail and vice verse (although there are some exceptions). This, not only helps to consolidate all my emails in one place, the fear of losing an email is reduced significantly. Now, after I got my new Gmail account, I started getting emails from friends and family, after I read them I use a feature called Archive. What archive does is, it removes selected email from inbox and places it in All mail folder. 

We can always access all the emails through ALL MAIL feature, but ARCHIVE option helps us keep inbox clean. With Archive feature, my inbox always has zero messages. Once I get a new message I know it is a new message, but before it was very hard for me to remember how many unread emails were already in my inbox.Using signature feature helps save time in typing regards xyz and so on every time we compose an email. The filter feature helps to save important emails in a single place to get easy access at a later time. There are many features in Gmail that helps to keep emailing simple. These are simple basic adjustments that make a significant difference in our life style. If you have any questions on how to do these adjustments, please leave a comment or question (s).